Only the
one who is "like this child" can recognize grace. That is why the one younger
than sin was the same one who is full of grace.

When Pope John Paul II visited Lourdes in 1983, he recalled Bernanos's
reference to the Blessed Virgin Mary as "younger than sin."[1] The
expression points to the Immaculate Conception of Mary; Lourdes was where Mary
identified herself as "the Immaculate Conception."

Bernanos's explanation is found in The Diary of a Country Priest.[2]
Bernanos speaks through M. le Cure de Torcy:

She is our Mother, the mother of all flesh, a new Eve. But she is also our
daughter. The ancient world of sorrow, the world before the access of grace,
cradled her to its very heart for many centuries, dimly awaiting a virgo
genetrix. For centuries and centuries those ancient hands, so full of sin,
cherished the wondrous girl-child whose name even was unknown. A little girl,
the queen of the angels! And she's still a little girl, remember! . . .
The simplicity of God, that terrible simplicity which damned the pride of the
angels. Our Lady knew neither triumph nor miracle. Her Son preserved her from
the least tip-touch of the savage wing of human glory. No one has ever lived,
suffered, died in such simplicity, in such deep ignorance of her own dignity....
For she was born without sin—in what amazing isolation! A pool so clear,
so pure, that even her own image—created only for the sacred joy of the
Father—was not to be reflected. The Virgin was Innocence ....The eyes of Our
Lady are the only real child-eyes that have ever been raised to our shame and
sorrow . . . they are not indulgent for there is no indulgence without something
of bitter experience—they are eyes of gentle pity, wondering sadness, and with
something more in them, never yet known or expressed, something that makes
her younger than sin [emphasis added], younger than the race from which she
sprang, and though a Mother by grace, mother of all graces, our little youngest
sister.

Mary belongs to the original state of human existence. I use the term
"original state" as does John Paul II in his "Wednesday Catechesis on Human
Love."[3] It designates the state of the human person as intended by the
Creator, before the fall. "Original" is understood in an existential state, not
according to linear historical time. It is a matter of archetypal experiences
which we can "reconstruct" from the accounts in the Book of Genesis of the state
before the fall (CHL, 12/12/79).
These experiences are revealing of what a human person is in God's plan of
creation. In spite of sin, they remain within us as a "distant echo"
of what we are meant to be. Although born into a world enslaved to sin, Mary
lived in the original state of human existence.[4] Her spiritual life was
entirely filled with God's Spirit.

According to the teaching of the Church, the original state was one of
"innocence," the innocence of humankind's childhood or youth. The present or
historical condition of human existence is the fruit of what happened "later,"
that is, sin separated man from his child-like innocence. Mary is thus "younger
than sin." Using these terms, redemption must be seen as the retrieval of childhood innocence.
It is only those who "become like children [who can] enter the kingdom of
heaven" (Mt 18:3). Only those who retrieve and sustain (by the power of grace)
those experiences of "original innocence" can enter the kingdom. When asked
about divorce, Jesus said that it was incompatible with "the beginning" of the
human race, with the state of original innocence (Mk 10:6). It had been
permitted by Moses because of the human "hardness of heart." His redeeming
mission, however, would offer to man a new heart, one free from enslavement to
sin, a youthful heart. In this article we shall examine what this youthful heart is like, guided by the study of original
innocence by Pope John Paul II in his Wednesday Catechesis.

The myth of the beginning

John Paul II introduces the "Catechesis on Human Love" as a work in
theological anthropology, an "adequate anthropology," he calls it.
"The adequate anthropology rests upon the essentially human experience and
is opposed to all reductionism of a naturalist type which often goes hand in
hand with the evolutionary theory of the origins of man" (CHL, 1/2/80).
That is, the adequate anthropology analyzes experiences held to be constitutive
of human personhood, especially of human subjectivity, of the person as a "who"
and not just a "what." These experiences are not reduced to a single common
origin (such as, say, in Marx, Freud, or Nietzsche, the "masters of suspicion").
This would be a "reduction of a naturalist type." These experiences are retrieved from
consciousness by "the very principle of reduction, characteristic of the
philosophy of man."[5]

The creation accounts of the Book of Genesis are a theological source for the
retrieval of these experiences, not only because they are the Word of God, but
because of their literary form as Adamic myths.[6] Myths are a privileged source
of these experiences because, in a sense, they are about those experiences
of the mystery of the origins of our identity. Myths articulate the religious sense, the most fundamental of our levels of consciousness,
the awareness of our contingency as creatures. Pope John Paul II quotes Paul Ricoeur:
"The myth is something other than an explanation of the world, of its history
and its destiny. It expresses in terms of the world, indeed of what is beyond
the world, or of a second world, the understanding that man has of himself
through relation with the fundamental and the limit of his existence.... It
expresses in an objective language the understanding that man has of his
dependence in regard to what lies at the limit and at the origin of his
world."[7] In particular, this analysis of "original anthropological
experiences" allows us to discover "the very structure of human identity in the
dimensions of the mystery of creation, and, at the same time, in the perspective
of the mystery of redemption" (CHL, 9/19/79).

Perennial meanings

The key to the analysis of these "original experiences" is the concept of
meaning, or significato. The adequate anthropology, it was seen, is
based on an analysis of the "original experiences" of identity, of personhood,
of subjectivity. These experiences are "meaningful," that is, they "make sense"
to us, they are adequate expressions of the truth about ourselves (based, the
pope insists, on the truth of creation and redemption). These experiences
communicate to us, make present to us, the truth of our creation and redemption.
They are therefore signs of this truth. The meaning or significato
of an experience is precisely the truth it makes present. The adequate
anthropology, therefore, is constituted through an analysis of the meaning of
original experiences. "The words of Christ have an explicit anthropological
content: they touch on those perennial meanings by means of which the adequate
anthropology is constituted" (CHL, 4/23/80).

Speaking of the "meaning of the body," the pope notes: The 'meaning' of the
body is not only something conceptual . . . [it] is at the same time that which
determines his attitude: his way of living of the body. It is the measure which
the interior man . . . applies to the body" (CHL,
6/25/90). The meaning of the body is the expression of the experience or
"attitude" of the person to his or her bodily self as it relates to
the experience of identity, of subjectivity, of interiority. With this
experience, man "measures" the importance of his body. The meaning of
the body is that measure applied to it by the "interior man."

The creation accounts in Genesis, therefore, convey to us the "perennial
meanings" that correspond to the structure of human personhood. Genesis does not
intend to tell us about what happened at the beginning of history measured
according to "linear time." Nor do the biblical creation accounts refer to
happenings in some realm above space and time. Rather, they reveal what John
Paul II calls "theological prehistory." The biblical prehistory is the primordial horizon within which history takes place.
It is thus present in history as the basis for our experience of history
itself. "Historical man is therefore, so to speak, rooted in his
revealed theological prehistory" (CHL, 9/26/79).

Without "prehistory," the history of man is incomprehensible. The
language that speaks immediately of the history of man, and mediately of his
prehistory, is a symbolic or mythical language. History together with prehistory
constitutes one narrative. Separating one from the other makes it impossible to
know either.

Eschatological myth

Historical man, however, is not constituted only by the experiences of
prehistory. There is another horizon present within which history is
experienced, the eschatological horizon. We could speak of it as
post-historical. Indeed, the "word" that touches man through his religious
sense, through "original experiences," the "meaning" perceived through these
experiences, the truth made present through them, is a truth framed by two
horizons. There is on one side the experience of a distancing from an original
state. Man is bound on one side by a sense of guilt as a result of this
distancing.[8] On the other side is the experience of hope. When man is
conscious of his being in history, he experiences having gone far from the
beginning which is the arche of his existence. He is aware of "being far
from." He experiences this as a fall, as the loss of his own self. It is then
that he recognizes this primordial beginning as the "original," as the fullness
of what he is, which gives birth to the hope of returning to that beginning at
the "end," as one returns home. The sense of guilt and hope permeates man's
experience of history, and gives to him the capacity to express that "beginning"
and that "end" as the "truth" about himself in history. This truth is thus made
present through "symbol," or significati,
meanings. Through them, pre- and post-history become understandable within
"history," making the latter comprehensible at the same time.

Myths, then, can be used to retrieve the original and ultimate meaning of
things and provide human life with guiding patterns. The primordial past and
eschatological future to which they refer are not part of history, but illud
tempus, archetypal time. They constitute the horizon for the experiences of
creation, fall, redemption, and triumph. These three cannot be separated if we
desire to grasp the full truth about man. John Paul II insists that an adequate
anthropology is constituted by this "triptych" of original,
historical, and eschatological states. "Science" as a mode of viewing
or intending man abstracts from prehistory and post-history; that is why the
"abstract man" can be manipulated and redesigned by technology. As S. Grygiel writes, man ceases to "exist poetically over this earth" (Holderlin),
and so the "prose of the world" (Hegel) renders him empty and
sterile.[9] Thus "sterilized" from pre- and post-history, he ceases to
exist as historical. It is, as Grygiel claims above, a result of the sense of
"distancing" or "guilt." The myth prepares for speculation concerning the
distinction between what is constitutive to created man (the "ontological") and
what is "historical." Indeed, this speculation will lead to conceptualization
and philosophy and it has to. Still, as John Paul II wonders: "The question,
whether the metaphysical reduction really expresses the content which the
symbolical and metaphorical language conceals within itself, is another matter"
(CHL, 9/19/79).

Original solitude

John Paul II treats original innocence in the audiences from January 30 to
February 20, 1980. His analysis builds on four concepts examined prior to
innocence, namely, original solitude, original unity, original nakedness, and
the nuptial meaning of the body. Here we can only summarize these as follows.

The solitude of which Genesis speaks is not the solitude of the male, but of
man as such. It is an experience of the humanum. The context in which
the experience of solitude appears is not primarily the creation of the woman,
but the call to human dominion. It occurs while man is "naming the
animals." Man is indeed a creature defined by the vocation to the
development of the resources of creation. His identity is tied to this vocation.
Carrying out his vocation, man becomes aware of his own superiority in
comparison with all else in creation. Self-knowledge develops at the same time
as knowledge of the world. Consciousness reveals man as the one who possesses
the cognitive faculty as regards the visible world. Yet, this knowledge brings
man out of his own being. It reveals man to man himself. Solitude, therefore,
signifies man's subjectivity which is constituted through self-knowledge. This
is the first revelation of man as person.

However, there is still an element lacking. The task of human dominion is
"limited" by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which
is the subject of a command that man was free to obey or disobey. That is, the
experience of solitude also contains within it the experience of freedom and
self-determination. Both self-consciousness and self-determination are
constitutive of subjectivity.

Carrying out the vocation to dominion, man experiences his relation to
matter, to the physical world to which he is linked through his body. The
experience of solitude, therefore, is inseparable from the experience of the
body.[10] One would imagine that it would have been otherwise; that the
experience of the body would have led man to notice his similarity with the
animals. Yet it is the other way around. Human personhood, therefore, is linked
to the body. As John Paul II states: "The analysis of the Yahwist text also
enables us to link man's original solitude with consciousness of the
body, through which man is distinguished from the animalia and 'is
separated' from them, and also through which he is a
person" (CHL, 10/24/79).

Original unity

The creation of the woman does not bring about the disappearance of solitude.
Solitude is inseparable from human personhood, as we have seen. Instead, with
the creation of the woman, solitude "becomes part of the meaning of original
unity" (CHL, 11/7/79): the experience of original
unity is part of the experience of solitude, that is, of personhood. The
creation of woman 'occurs" while man is in a deep sleep. Sleep is used here
to indicate a specific return, so to speak, to non-being so that man might
emerge again this time with his dual gender unity clearly manifested.[11] We
could say that solitude, personhood, incarnates itself in gender
differentiation; that is how it is disclosed, but it is, of course, not
exhausted by it.

The pope speaks of a double solitude: with respect to the animalia,
and with respect to one another. These are not "two solitudes"; this is the dual
nature of the one solitude of man which affirms subjectivity, self-knowledge
through self-determination linked now
to the experience of the meaning of the body as masculine and feminine. Thus
solitude is seen as the way that leads to communio personarum. Solitude,
therefore (and thus subjectivity, being someone!) is an opening up to the
"other" in a communion of persons. Subjectivity is constituted through communio.

The Priestly account of creation links the term "image of God" to
gender polarity. In the second account, human personhood is disclosed through
gender differentiation. The body as masculine and feminine (recall the
experience of solitude is inseparable from the experience of the body) is always
at the point of intersection between "image of God" and
"communion of persons." Therefore, the sexual body has profound
theological dimensions. Because the body "reveals" the person, man is
a being who even in his corporeality is the image of God.

The unity between man and woman is achieved when they "cleave" together so as
to become "one flesh." The reference is clearly to the sexual act, which is also
associated with the blessing of fertility. Therefore, the sexual act is an act
through which man and woman experience the mystery of solitude which makes their
unity and fruitfulness possible. Through the sexual union they "recognize each
other" as when Adam "recognized" Eve as "flesh of my flesh and bones of my
bones." They relive, as it were, the original (in the existential way symbolized
by the creation myth) experience of solitude. John Paul II calls this experience
of solitude through the sexual act the discovery or experience of the virginal value of man.
"This means reliving, in a sense, the original virginal value of man, which
emerges from the mystery of his solitude before God and in the midst of the
world" (CHL, 11/21/79).

We have here the possibility to speak of the union between virginity and
fecundity in the original state, as Balthasar argues in The Christian
State of Life.[12] Of course we cannot fully picture to ourselves how the
link between virginity and fecundity can be expressed physically (as we must
hold it to be, since it is as an experience of the body that the experience of
solitude appears), anymore than we can picture a body free from physical
corruption. Still, the fact that the experience of original unity by historical
man contains traces, so to speak, of such a dimension of the experience of
solitude, shows that the historical condition is not totally closed to this
mystery. Balthasar writes of "a ray of hope" given to Adam and Eve after the
fall, but still somehow within the experience of the original state ("before
they had been driven into exile," he calls it).[13] The primordial experience of
hope, as we saw, is more associated with the myth of the "end" of history, with
eschatological language. But as John Paul II explains in his analysis of the
words of Christ about the absence of marriage after the resurrection, the
eschatological state is one in which virginity and newness of life
(eschatological fecundity) will once again be reunited, and this as part of the
eschatological experience of the body.[14] Our ability to
discover this truth in our experience of "original unity" in the
historical state is in fact due to the presence of the eschatological future in
the historical world as a result of the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The "pre-destination" of this saving event ("anticipation of its
merits," one might say more traditionally) has made possible the appearance
within the historical state of the embodiment of the "ray of hope"
given to Adam and Eve to which Balthasar refers, namely, "the one human being
who, because she knew not man, was able to be at once virgin and mother,"[15]
the Blessed Virgin Mary. That is why Bernanos spoke of the generations after the
fall awaiting a virgo genetrix.

Original nakedness

Another primordial experience found in Genesis's creation account by the
Yahwist source is the lack of shame at being naked (cf. Gen 2:25). The
passage from this lack to the shame present after the fall is not a question of
not noticing nakedness and then noticing it. It is a matter of a "radical change
of the meaning of the original nakedness" of one before the other (CHL, 12/12/79), as this meaning is constituted within
subjectivity.

Nor does the lack of shame refer to some under-developed psychological stage
(as children might not mind their nakedness); we are not really talking about a
lack; we are talking of a positive experience of nakedness which later
disappears. It is the experience of being affirmed in one's own self precisely
through this total exposure to and for the other. This betokens a particular
consciousness of the meaning of one's body as being, in its masculinity and
femininity, a sign of being—for the other as the means of affirming and
achieving the desired unity. The body not only does not stand in the way of this
unity; it points to it and makes it possible concretely.

The body is the enfleshment of that subjective being—for the other which
constitutes human existence, human subjectivity. Here the body through its
nakedness shows itself as transparent to man's interiority, as in the case of
the Blessed Virgin, a "pool so clear, so pure," as Bernanos said,
"that even her own image (the image of her body) was not to be
reflected."[16] The masculine and feminine bodies, in their nakedness,
appear thus as the perfect vehicles for the gift of self one to the other.

This being made inter-personal communion, the truth about human subjectivity
(which is always a physical/gender subjectivity), is part of man being the image
of God. Therefore, original nakedness points to that experience of existence
within the vision of God. "Nakedness signifies the original good of God's
vision." This shows that in the original state there is no interior rupture
and opposition between what is spiritual and what is sensible.

Nuptial meaning of the body

The concept of the nuptial meaning of the body, so important to the
theological anthropology developed by John Paul II, follows from the meaning of
original nakedness. The body, as we saw, incarnates the being for
characteristic of human subjectivity. Human existence is thus understood through
a "hermeneutics of the gift": "The dimension of the gift decides the essential
truth and depth of meaning of the original solitude—unity-nakedness. It is also
at the very heart of the mystery of creation, which enables us to construct the
theology of the body "from the beginning" but demands, at the same time, that we
should construct it just in this way" (CHL, 1/2/80). Thus the body as male and female is a "witness to
creation as a fundamental gift, and so a witness to love as the source from
which this same giving springs.... Such is the meaning with which sex enters the
theology of the body" (CHL, 1/9/80).

The body witnesses to a theological reality, to love as the source of all
creation. This Trinitarian love can be grasped only through the grace of
God. Therefore, to say that original man is able to experience creation as gift
of love through the body is to say that original man's experience of
subjectivity through personal communion is a "subjectively beatifying
experience"; that is, an experience of beatitude, of grace (CHL, 1/9/80).

The "meaning of the body," as we saw, refers to the capacity of the human
body to make present the truth about the human person, namely, his origins in
Trinitarian love. The human person encounters this Trinitarian love through the
experience of the body's participation in his personal identity. The "meaning of
the body" is how man "measures" its worth, its importance, its value in terms of
his experience of subjectivity. The meaning of the body determines the attitude
of man, it evokes a certain stand or interior disposition with respect to the
body. When the experience of the body makes present the Trinitarian love at the
origins of creation, when it is thus a "subjectively beatifying experience" of
grace, then we can speak of the nuptial meaning of the body. The nuptial meaning of the body is a
theological concept. "Nuptial" designates the "being-for the
other" nature of personal existence, but the concept of nuptial meaning
always includes the experience of the origins in divine love of this
"being-for." It always designates a "subjectively beatifying
experience."

"In fact, in the whole perspective of his own 'history,' man will not fail to
confer a nuptial meaning on his own body. Even if this meaning undergoes and
will undergo many distortions, it will always remain the deepest level, which
demands to be revealed in all simplicity and purity, and to be shown in its
whole truth, as a sign of the 'image of God"' (CHL, 1/9/80). It is
precisely through the experience of the nuptial meaning of the body that man
becomes aware of the original state as the primordial "beginning" of his history.
The drama of sin and redemption in the historical state is played, so to speak,
on the stage of the nuptial meaning of the body. Awareness of the nuptial
meaning of the body "is the fundamental element of human existence in the world"
(CHL, 1/9/80). That is why "redemption of the body" designates not an
"aspect" of redemption, but
redemption itself. Original innocence, therefore, must designate an
experience of the nuptial meaning of the body.

Original innocence

If the experience of the nuptial meaning of the body is a "subjectively
beatifying experience," that is, an experience of grace, of a participation in
the inner life of God himself as love, then the experience of the nuptial
meaning of the body is possible because of that "original justice" or "original
righteousness" in which man was created, which becomes present in his original
moral consciousness. It is "purity of heart, which preserves an interior
faithfulness to the gift according to the nuptial meaning of the body" (CHL,
1/30/80). It is a "moral participation in the eternal and permanent act of God's
will" (CHL, 2/6/80).

Theology, writes John Paul II, "has constructed the global image of
man's original innocence and justice, prior to original sin, by applying the
method of objectivization proper to metaphysics and metaphysical anthropology.
In this analysis we are trying rather to take into consideration the aspect of
human subjectivity [which] seems to be closer to the original texts,"
especially the Yahwist account (CHL, 2/13/80). We see in this quotation
the entire philosophical and theological agenda of Pope John Paul II.

Pope John Paul II describes the "existential configuration" of man in each of
the three "states" (original, historical, and eschatological) in terms of
particular configurations of the "system of forces" that characterize man bodily
(sensitivity), psychologically (affectivity), and spiritually (relation with
God). Connected with this is the concept of "spiritualization."
"Spiritualization" designates the role played by man's "spirit" (openness to or
link with God's Spirit) in each of the three states. The original state, he
says, "indicates a degree of 'spiritualization' of man different from [the one]
after original sin." It designates "another composition of the interior forces
of man himself, almost another body-soul relationship, other inner proportions
between sensitivity, spirituality, and affectivity" (CHL, 2/13/80). It is
a degree of "interior sensitiveness to the gifts of the Holy Spirit" that is
radically different from what we have now (CHL, 2/13/80).

There is another concept useful for the understanding of original innocence.
It is that of "ethos." The "permanent roots of the human" are revealed to us by
the "ethos of the body" (CHL, 2/13/80).
The word "ethos" points towards an order of values. It is used to
denote the characteristic traits of a particular people or culture: the American
ethos, the Germanic ethos, the Latin ethos, etc. It reflects how a people
perceive life and its purpose, their priorities, what they consider significant,
real, or true, how they prefer to deal with problems, needs and questions, etc.
It is an attitude based on a particular hierarchy of values.
"Meaning," we saw, compels an attitude. The "ethos of the
body" is thus the reflection of the "nuptial meaning of the
body"; "ethos" is the basis of the "ethical." An action
is ethical if it truly corresponds to the authentic "ethos" of the
body. An attitude not in accordance with it is "unethical."

For example, concerning sexual desire, man is moved by the
"erotica!," by the love known as "eros," the attraction of what
is perceived as good, true, and beautiful. These desires should be structured
according to what is "ethical," that is, to the nuptial meaning of the body. "It
is necessary continually to rediscover in what is 'erotic' the nuptial meaning
of the body and the true dignity of the gift," writes John Paul II. In this way
"ethos becomes the constituent form of ergs" (CHL 11 /12/80).

In John Paul's words: original innocence means that the nuptial meaning
of the body "is conditioned ethically," and "on its part, it
constitutes the future of the human ethos" (CHL, 2/13/80).
Indeed, "understanding of the fundamental meanings contained in the very
structure of creation, such as the nuptial meaning of the body (and of the
fundamental conditionings of this meaning), is important and indispensable in
order to know who man is and who he should be, and therefore how he should mold
his own activity. It is an essential and important thing for the future of the
human ethos" (CHL, 2/13/80).

The word "future" is important because ethos refers to an action to be taken;
ethos is an orientation, an interior disposition, that influences how the man
will act in the future. We could say that it is the expression of "destiny." The
"ethos of the body" points to the "destiny of the body" in God's plan of
creation and redemption. The dominant experience in the original state is that
of "gift," therefore we can speak of the ethos of the gift. "Through the
ethos of the gift the problem of the 'subjectivity' of man, who is a subject
made in the image and likeness of God, is partly outlined" (CHL, 2/20/80).

After the fall, even when this configuration of forces (or degree of
spiritualization) changes drastically, the ethos of the gift will not disappear.
It will produce in man a commitment inscribed deep within the human heart that
will be like a "distant echo" of original innocence. Through it, man will
continually be led to "re-discover" himself as "the guardian of the mystery of
the subject, that is, of the freedom of the gift" (CHL, 2/20/80).

Original innocence also allows us to speak about a sacramentality of the
body. John Paul II understands "sacrament" to designate "a sign that
transmits effectively in the visible world the invisible mystery hidden in God
from time immemorial" (CHL, 2/20/80). The very definition of the "nuptial
meaning of the body" points to this. The nuptial meaning of the body is the
experience of the body as a sign that communicates a presence, the presence of
the truth about the human person originating in Trinitarian love. The body,
through the original experience of its meaning, effectively communicates that
presence. That is why it was an experience of "original innocence," a
subjectively beatifying experience. In the New Testament, especially in
the writings of Paul, the term "mystery" designates God's plan for creation and
redemption, the economy of salvation (CHL, 9/8/82). God's plan, the mystery, is
described as the creation and recapitulation of all things in Christ, more
precisely, in the relation between the Father and Jesus Christ.[17] This is the
ultimate origin of our identity as persons. It is to this mystery, to the
Trinitarian event (to use Balthasar's term) at its root, to which the nuptial
meaning of the body points. This is why original innocence allows us to speak of
the body as sacrament.

"The sacrament, as a visible sign, is constituted with man, as a 'body,'
by means of his 'visible' masculinity and femininity. The body, in fact, and it
alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the
divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the
mystery hidden since time immemorial in God, and thus be a sign of it."[18]

In the section dealing with the eschatological state, John Paul II deepens
this insight about original innocence and the sacramentality of the body. He
writes: "The Letter to the Ephesians leads us to approach . . . the state of man
before original sin from the point of view of the mystery hidden in God for all
eternity" (CHL, 10/6/82). Ephesians speaks of a plan of the Father before
the creation of man: "God, Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ . . . has blessed us
in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. He chose us in
him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless
before him" (cf. Eph 1:3-4). That is, the creation of man and his election in Jesus Christ are inseparable. The following
words, relating original innocence to Jesus Christ, are at the heart of John
Paul II's theological anthropology:

This implies that the primordial gift conferred on man by God already
includes within itself the fruit of having been chosen. Before sin, man bore in
his soul the fruit of eternal election in Christ, the eternal Son of the Father.
By means of the grace of this election man, male and female, was "holy and
blameless" before God. That primordial (or original) holiness and purity were
expressed also in the fact that, although both were "naked they were not
ashamed" (Gen 2:25).... One must deduce that the reality of man's creation was
already imbued by the perennial election of man in Christ.... Man, male and
female, shared from the "beginning" in this supernatural gift. This bounty was
granted in consideration of him, who from eternity was "beloved" as Son, even
though—according to the dimensions of time and history—it had preceded the
Incarnation of this "beloved Son" and also the "redemption" which we have in him
"through his blood" (Eph 1:7). The redemption was to become the source of man's
supernatural endowment after sin, and in a certain sense, in spite of sin. This
supernatural endowment, which took place before original sin, that is, the grace of justice and original innocence [emphasis added]—an endowment
which was the fruit of man's election in Christ before the ages—was
accomplished precisely in reference to him, to the beloved One, while
anticipating chronologically his coming in the body.... Marriage is a sacrament
inasmuch as it is an integral part and, I would say, the central point of the
"sacrament of creation." In this sense, it is the primordial
sacrament.

Original innocence, therefore, designates Christ's own "innocence."

Children in the eternal Child

In his last book,[19] Balthasar grounds the teaching of Jesus about "becoming
like children" in order to enter the kingdom in Christ's own experience as the
eternal Child of the Father. He is the "archetypical Child who has his abode in
the Father's bosom."[20] His "identity is inseparable from his being a child in
the bosom of the Father."[21] In an essay in the collection Homo creatus est,[22] Balthasar
explains that since in Jesus processio and missio are identical, his
"being a Child" remains always present "within" his adult
decision to follow this will of the Father and none other. Thus throughout his
earthly life this childlike attitude is preserved, even at the moment of
abandonment on the Cross when he asks the Father: "Why?" This is a
child's question, Balthasar notes, and the Wisdom of God at this moment is a
Child who for the moment is unable to receive a reply. The mission of Jesus,
identical with his procession, is precisely to introduce men and women into his
"coming forth" from the Father. Thus they become children in the Child,
empowered by the Spirit to say Abba (cf. Rom 8:15ff.). This is
not a metaphor; as Balthasar insists, it is the most intimate reality of the
gospel.

This enables Balthasar to say that in this truth it is possible to surpass the opposition between playfulness and seriousness. For God
nothing is more serious than the creation of the world through the
predestination of Christ. Yet Scripture shows the Wisdom of God expressing this
as a playful occasion: "Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the
beginning of the earth . . . then I was daily his delight, rejoicing [lit.
"playing"] before him always, rejoicing [playing] in his inhabited
world and delighting in the sons of men" (cf. Prov 9:29ff.). A game, says
Balthasar, leading to the flagellation and the crown of thorns, which, for all
their horrifying seriousness, are part of the same plan. Childhood and death, at
least the death of a believer, are close to each other. It is a matter of
handing oneself totally to the Other, the Father from whom all life comes. The
child is born totally naked in body and spirit, entirely abandoned to the
mystery of the Father. All that occurs between birth and death covers this
radical dependence. Death brings it to light. For Christ all is always clearly
coming from the Father eternally and returning to him eternally, at each single
moment, always this "sacred game" which all are invited to join
becoming "like children."

The result of this kind of life is an enthusiastic and firm commitment to
the reality of the world, of the here and now, of the concrete. Balthasar
notes how the ancient wise thinkers, such as Socrates or Laotse, grew old and
considered it "wisdom" to withdraw serenely from the illusions of the world,
from its dramatic condition, from its passions, from the bluntness of the flesh
and its fierce demands. Aging brought about this detachment. Not so with Jesus,
who died a young man. It is as if the truth of his identity as the eternal Child
of the Father would prevent him from aging. And the death of Jesus was precisely
an insertion into the very heart of the drama of earthly life with its conflicts
and passions. The purpose of the death of Jesus was not to escape the demands of
the flesh, but to redeem the flesh. His death was an
embrace of all that is earthly. Does not the Wisdom of God appear as foolishness
to the "wise" (cf. 1 Cor 1:25-27)?

There is a concept in John Paul II's "Catechesis on Human Love" which
captures this attitude, this ethos, this devotion to reality which ties the
"youthfulness of childhood" to the state of original innocence, to the fruit of
redemption, and to eschatological life. It is the concept of spontaneity.

Spontaneity

Spontaneity emerges within the discussion about the "ethical" and the
"erotic." In the state of original innocence, the two are inseparable. Ethos
becomes the "constituent form of ergs" during the experience of the nuptial
meaning of the body (CHL, 11/12/80), a "subjectively beatifying
experience," a grace-filled experience, the experience of original innocence. In
the case of sexual activity, it is the fear of many that ethical concerns are
often opposed to what is spontaneously erotic. This fear reveals that the
nuptial meaning of the body has not been fully interiorized by the one who is
afraid. Such a fear, explains John Paul II, is due to a rupture between the
"exterior" and "interior man." The failure to grasp the nuptial meaning of the
body occurs in the interior man; it is a failure in interiority, indeed, it is
the lack, so to speak, of sufficient interiority, the lack of depth (CHL, 11/12/80).

Man must learn to experience the nuptial meaning of the body as an experience
of interiority, an experience in the "heart." It is a matter of learning how to
"discern and judge the various movements of the heart" (CHL, 11/12/80).
Indeed true spontaneity is the outcome of such interiority, one that fully
resonates to the truth signified by the experience "in the heart" of the body as
masculine or feminine. Spontaneity thus arises out of a true grasping of the
real, that is, of the meaning or ethos of nature, of the flesh. A man or
woman without interiority cannot perceive meanings. He or she can perceive only
functions, numbers, abstractions. His or her relationships are purely
"external," interchangeable, commercial, utilitarian. The "spontaneity" of the
"external man" is none other than animal instinct, or worse, the response of a
robot when its circuits are activated. Lacking self-possession and self-control,
such a person lacks the ability to grasp the "ethos of the gift." Blind to the
experience of gift, such a person recognizes only "impulses" to which she or he
responds with built-in, programmed reactions. That person is not truly free. And this can almost be seen in that person's bodily
gestures, lacking in authenticity, precisely in spontaneity. Instead, in the
case of original innocence retrieved through redemption as the anticipation of
eschatological fulfillment, "the human heart becomes a participant, so to speak,
in another spontaneity, of which 'carnal man' knows nothing or very little" (CHL, 11 /12/80).

To repeat, it is not only in sexual life that "innocence" leads to
spontaneity; it is in all human activity, in an authentic human praxis.
In the area of human development of the resources of the earth for life, the
area of work, the opposite of spontaneity is that alienation which Marx
saw but did not understand. Lacking that spontaneity which is the expression of
an authentic interiority, alienated man manipulates, forces, and destroys
reality, contented with the artificial. Culture, which comes from colere,
"cultivating" or "tilling the earth" (human dominion
according to Genesis), becomes the culture of the artificial, of the purely
functional, of the replaceable, the "culture of death" described in
John Paul II's encyclical Evangelium Vitae.

Such is the spontaneity with which the country priest confronts the countess
in Bernanos's novel and brings about her conversion.[23] Towards the end of the
novel (and of the priest's life), the connection is made with childhood, with
youthfulness. The country priest had been obsessed with his apparent failure to
bring about spiritual results in his ministry. The meeting with the countess had
been the first time, a meeting centered on a discussion for which he had not
prepared intellectually. He had entered into it with all the innocence of his
youth. Thinking back on this, he writes: "And I know now that youth is a
gift from God, and like all his gifts, carries no regret.... There was no old
man in me.... This awareness is sweet. For the first time in years—perhaps for
the first time ever—I seem to stand before my youth and look upon it without
mistrust.... And my youth looks back at me, forgives me. Disheartened by the
sheer clumsiness in me which always kept me back, I demanded of my youth what
youth alone can't give, and I said it was a stupid thing and was ashamed of
being young."[24] This is the man whose last words were "Everything is
grace."

Only the one who is "like this child" can recognize grace That is why the one
younger than sin was the same one who is full of grace.

Endnotes

1 Cf. Origins 13 (8 September 1983).

2 George Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest (Chicago: McMillan
Co., 1937).

3 These addresses have been collected in four volumes: Original Unity of
Man and Woman: Catechesis on the Book of Genesis (Boston: Daughters of St.
Paul, 1981) Blessed are the Pure of Heart: Catechesis on the Sermon on the
Mount and Writings of St. Paul (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1983); Reflections on Humanae Vitae: Conjugal Morality and Spirituality
(Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1984), The Theology of Marriage and
Celibacy: Catechesis on Marriage and Celibacy in the Light of the Resurrection
of the Body (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1986). Henceforth they will be
referred to as CHL, and will be followed by the appropriate month, day,
and year.

4 The same cannot be said of her other dimensions, since she was subject to
aging, pain, sadness, and death. She shared this dimension with all, including
her divine Son. At this level she had to await the effects of the Lord's
redeeming death. In a human being, the spiritual exists through the
psychological and physical. Because the latter for Mary was not in the original
state, we can say with Bernanos that she experienced physically and
psychologically the pressure of sin in the world, but she did so in "wondering
sadness" (surprise douloureuse). However, the
doctrine of the Assumption reveals that, as soon as the redemption of the body
was possible, Mary experienced its full effects, since she did not know sin.

5 CHL, 1/2/80. For a summary of how John Paul II understands the
"principle of reduction" and the difference between its usual phenomenological
application and that of the pope, see Kenneth L. Schmitz, At the Center of the Human Drama (Washington: The Catholic University of
America Press, 1995).

6 "A reflection in depth on this text—through the whole archaic form
of the narrative, which manifests its primitive mythical character—provides us
'in nucleo' with nearly all the elements of the analysis of man, to which modern
and especially contemporary philosophical anthropology is sensitive," writes
John Paul II in CHL, 9/19/79. Stanislaw Grygiel writes that this
analysis "marks a change in the philosophical thought of the author. For
the first time, in fact, he engages in the hermeneutic of a text constituted by
symbols and myth." Cf. "Della solitudine al dono," in La Voce nel Deserto: Post-scriptum all'insegnamento di Giovanni Paolo II (Bologna: CSEO, 1981).

10 "This consciousness brings with it a particular perception of the meaning
of one's own body, emerging precisely from the fact that it falls to man to
'till the earth' and 'subdue it.' All that would be impossible without a
typically human intuition of the meaning of one's body." Cf. CHL,
10/31/79.

11 Remember, at all times this is the same man; there is never an androgynous
prior state. The "return to non-being" is a device to highlight the
constitutive nature of the gender duality, the very opposite of androgyny!

12 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983), 94. Balthasar believes that the "fecundity of
human love would have been quite different in paradise—if man had persevered
there—from what it is since the fall. Just as man's spiritual powers were
emancipated by sin from their previous state of loving obedience in faith, so
his bodily potentialities were severed from the fecundity of love, which was
also disturbed by man's disobedience, and appropriated power to themselves in
sexual love. Only then did there come to be a difference
between virginity and fecundity. In paradise, Eve's virginity would not have
been threatened by her motherhood. The love of man and wife would have been
wholly chaste, finding the impetus for its fecundity in the spirit and admitting
the body to this chaste love only in the role of a servant. We can no more
picture to ourselves the nature of this fecundity of paradise than we can
picture to ourselves most of the other conditions of man's original state."
In John Paul II's analysis, the understanding of the creation accounts as
pre-historical also prevents us from "picturing" exactly how the link between
virginity and fecundity was achieved physically. Still, John Paul's insights
about the "virginal meaning" of the act of sexual unity itself as intended by God (original unity) releases us from trying to
imagine any other way of conceiving new human life so as to preserve
"virginity."

13 Ibid.

14 "This will be a completely new experience, and at the same time it will
not be alienated in any way from what man took part in 'from the beginning' nor
from what, in the historical dimension of his existence, constituted in him the
source of the tension between spirit and body, concerning mainly the procreative
meaning of the body and sex. The man of the 'future world' will find again in
this new experience of his own body precisely the completion of what he bore
within himself perennially and historically, in a certain sense, as a heritage
and even more as a duty and objective, as the content of the ethical norm." Cf.
CHL, 1/13/82.

15 The Christian State of Life, 94.

16 Cf. The Diary of a Country Priest.

17 Balthasar's theodramatic meta-anthropology is based on this mystery of the
"predestination of Christ" and our predestination in him.

18 CHL, 9/8/82. Actually, John Paul says it is possible to speak of
the sacramentality of creation, the sacramentality of the world. He explains it
as such: "Man, in fact, by means of his corporeality, his masculinity and
femininity, becomes a visible sign of the economy of truth and love, which has
its source in God himself and which was revealed already in the mystery of
creation."